your love came with a knife
and I grasped it to my chest
like a starved girl in need of something
and when it sliced into my soft flesh
my ground and sky turned black
and a thousand lost souls mourned
for my heart
you consumed me just to satisfy your greed
a hunger inside of you caused by loneliness
and your young impetuousness craved
to dig in and taste my rich goodness
those parts of me you saw in no other woman
“you are so different” you would whisper to me
as you cut and pulled me from myself
pieces splintered into a billion fragments
were you simply a madman out for a kill
or did you specifically target my heart to rape?
you were too stupid to see
that you could’ve had it forever
if you had just tried to love me
(why didn’t you try?)
go on
leave
go play your love games with her instead
next time maybe it’s you who will be sliced apart

just give me back what is left of me
so that someday I can become whole again

hanging in the space
between you and me
like neon signs, flashing
police lights and siren screams
choking the air from my lungs

they are the words
I’ve known for a long time but
half expected to never hear

I look at your face
filled with stupidity and arrogance
and reach out to enfold my small fingers
around those words of black pain
to stuff the loud
blinking screaming hurt back
where they came from

they crawl into your jugular
and wrap around your larynx
squeezing it
a boa constrictor
the same way your words
suffocated the flesh of my hope
until it was drained
gagging, and left dusty and grey

I watch as these words of your making
are soaked into the depths of your lungs
moving through your aveoli and
absorbed into your blood
so that you can feel the toxicity of your
selfishness seep through
every part of your body
the same way that it seeped into
my every pain receptor, every blood cell

I want you to know the feeling
of how your sated poison
traveled throughout my body
so it will always remind you of
the words that came out of your mouth
sliding and heavy, like a snake in old mud
and that they in fact choked you, bit you, killed you
this fever of your petulance
that hissed at me with a languid tongue,
this manufactured idea that you
somehow ‘deserved’ me without effort,
had ‘earned’ and ‘possessed’ me like
a purchased piece of art that you never
quite understood so you hid it away
locked, wilting, gathering dust
from loneliness and neglect
and kept it just so you could
say you owned it

darling, do you feel that flavor of
metal in your mouth?
can you taste the weight of the iron
as it soaks through your taste buds
and sits fully on the top of your palette?
this pungency is the taste
of my blood
exiting your world
and the quintessence of your existence
being purged from my heart,
like a fever pushing out a sickness
where the only remnants are the
exiled drops of death
left on your tongue, lingering,
to always remind you that

a box of school papers,
drawings of stick people
long and strong, mom and aunt
drawn like
the pillars they were for you

I help your mom decide
what to keep and what to give away

we find your favorite shoes
the ones I bought
the day after you moved in with me
funny how shoes
can mean so much
a world of memories in worn red leather
and white shoelaces
I hug them for a while
as your mom reads a letter she found
where you confess your young love
but never sent it
did they ever know?
perhaps it was your secret
(until now)

your entire life
reduced down to small flashes
kept in a box
I pick up a photo of you
when you were 1 year old
our bald copper-skinned baby
that always smiled at strangers
and ran to me whenever I was around
your sweet angel face
looks back with such innocence,
I find myself choking the tears back
for fear that your photo could see it on my face
that you would be diagnosed the next year
and carry the weight of a lifetime of
sickness and fighting for your life
with traces of happiness squished in between

my brave niece, never blaming
never angry
always finding ways to enjoy life
despite the hospitals, needles, and pain
always comforting rather than being comforted
your warm flesh and soft hand
my best memories of you

I put the photo down
and hide it in the bottom of the pile
so that you, my beautiful little baby,
cannot see the design
from the telling sadness in my eyes
that you would die at 19
and leave us behind
hugging your shoes
and reading your letters
and not wanting to let anything go
to hold on to each piece and fragment
so we stop feeling like we’re losing more of you
than we already have